Culture Machine, Reviews

Peter Knight (2000) Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files

London: Duke University Press. ISBN: 0-8223-2919-0.

Dietrologia: The
Language of Conspiracy Culture

Niran Abbas

The language of conspiracy has become a familiar feature of the
political and cultural landscape in the last couple of decades.
Peter Knight's book, Conspiracy Culture1
chronicles narratives from JFK to The X-Files.
This book examines how and why a reconfigured culture of conspiracy
has become so influential over the last quarter century or so.
Knight examines a presumption towards conspiracy as both a mode of
explanation and a mode of political operation, which he terms
'conspiracy culture' (CC, 3).

Conspiracy theories have a long history in the USA. It could
even be argued that the Republic itself was founded amid fears and
allegations on both sides, with the leaders of the American
revolution well schooled in discerning political intrigue and
deception, a lesson they had learned from British politics
(CC, 2). The identity of the emerging state was shaped by
the continual fear of sinister enemies, both real and imagined,
both external and internal. American history has seen more than the
threat to God's chosen nation, conjuring up tales about subversive
forces ranging form Catholics and Communists, and from the Masons
to the militias. Following the assassination of President Kennedy
in 1963, Knight claims conspiracy theories have become a regular
feature of everyday political and cultural life, not so much an
occasional outburst of counter-subversive invective as part and
parcel of many people's normal way of thinking about who they are
and how the world works. Conspiracy theories are now less a sign of
mental delusion than an ironic stance towards knowledge and the
possibility of truth, operating within the rhetorical terrain of
the double negative. 'I may be paranoid, [. . .] but that doesn't
mean that they're not out to get me' (CC, 2).

Narratives of conspiracy capture a sense of uncertainty about
how historical events unfold, about who gets to tell the official
version of events and even about whether a casually coherent
account is still possible. In the era of transnational corporations
and a globalized economy, conspiracy-minded stories and rumors in
the USA also voice suspicions about who--if anyone--is in control
of the national economic destiny, and what it means to be American.
The first chapter of the book presents a summary of the broad
changes in the style and function of conspiracy thinking since the
1960's with an analysis of scholars such as Douglas Hofstadter,
Robert Robins and Jerald Post among various others and an
examination of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990). What many
of these popular and academic studies have in common is their
resistance on condemning and disproving the cultural logic of
paranoia. Chapter 2 deals with the Kennedy assassination, the
'mother-lode of this new conspiracy style' (CC, 4), and explores
why it functions as an inevitably ambiguous point of origin for a
loss of faith in authority and coherent causality--the primal scene
of a postmodern sense of paranoia. The next two chapters explore
how the logic of conspiracy has shaped two of the new social
movements emerging form the 1960s, namely feminism and black
activism. In each of these cases, images of conspiracy have helped
the analysis of institutional oppression (sexism and racism
respectively), but in doing so they have blurred the distinction
between a literal allegation of conspiracy and a metaphorical
allusion. Chapter 5 discusses how previous fears about invasion of
the body politic have mutated into an everyday panic about the
viral infiltration of the body itself, as people find themselves
integrated into a globalized environment of risk. The final chapter
assesses, through a reading of Don Delillo's Underworld
(1998), how conspiracy culture has given expression to fears and
fantasies that everything is becoming connected.

The Introduction, 'Conspiracy/Theory,' describes and analyzes
approaches to conspiracy theory as a political practice. The most
wide-ranging of academic studies by Knight documents the historian
Richard Hofstadter's classic essay, 'The Paranoid Style in American
Politics;' Daniel Pipe's Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style
Flourishes and Where It Comes From; Robert Robins and Jerrold
Post's Political Paranoia and Elaine Showalter's
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. All
these writers suggest, according to Knight, that conspiracy
theories have been and will continue to be very harmful forms of
belief. Together they conclude that it is the responsibility of the
intellectual to condemn the paranoid style wherever and whenever it
is discovered. Their ultimate concern is less to understand the
exact cause or significance of the 'plague of paranoia' than to
help prevent an outbreak. In contrast, the present study starts
from the position that contemporary conspiracy thinking can indeed
be dangerous and deluded, but it can also be a necessary and
sometimes even a creative response to the rapidly changing
condition of America since the 1960's. Conspiracy culture, in
short, provides an everyday epistemological quick-fix to often
intractably complex problems. The task is therefore not to condemn
but to understand why the logic of conspiracy has become attractive
in so many different areas of American culture, and how it is
reshaping how people think about questions of causality, agency,
responsibility, and identity. The chapter critiques both the
political and epistemological assumptions of consensus, pluralism
and process, and their application in recognizing the seeming Other
as a form of political sickness.2

In many ways, the assassination of President Kennedy, according
to Knight, has come to function as the primal scene of
postmodernism. It is represented as an initial moment of trauma
that ruptured the nation's more innocent years, and which in
retrospect has come to be seen as the origin of present woes. As
Knight shows in his Kennedy chapter, the highly mediated death of
JFK represents the limit case before things became (in DeLillo's
term) unmanageable (qtd CC, 116). In this way, the reshot and
retold in countless media repetitions come to serve as an
appropriate primal scene for the cultural logic of late capitalism
that is dominated by the simulated spectacle. The increasing sense
of doubt about even the most basic of facts and causal connections
also makes the Kennedy case a fitting myth of origin for a cultural
logic marked by its skepticism about the authoritative power of
narrative. The proliferation of narratives about the conspiratorial
activities of the authorities has in effect helped undermine the
authority of narrative. In this way, the accumulated conspiratorial
focus on the case over the last four decades has contributed to an
ineradicable sense of strangeness, mystery and skepticism, making
the assassination a fitting fountainhead for a widespread sense of
paranoia, albeit very different to the 'paranoid style' outlined by
Hofstadter.

'Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,' Norman Mailer has
remarked, 'we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable
spiritual states, apathy or paranoia' (Mailer 129). No one has
mapped these 'spiritual states' as obsessively as Thomas Pynchon,
whose self-proclaimed paranoids (the obsessive Herbert Stencil of
V., for instance) are often set into relief against
apathetic figures (like V.'s 'human yo-yo,' Benny
Profane). Such alternatives are also essential to popular
conspiracy fictions, where a potentially paranoid individual often
attempts to convince more apathetic characters that a dangerous
plot is afoot. The repeated connection of these rival postures in
postwar literature seems to indicate a serious cultural problem: on
the one hand, a deep suspicion about the causes of important social
events, and on the other, a feeling that no matter how aggressively
pursued, those causes will never be fathomed. It also represents a
form of 'paranoia' that is self-critical, tempered with skepticism
about its own theories. This sort of 'paranoia' in Pynchon's often
cited words, that 'everything is connected' (Gravity's
Rainbow, 703), is more than an interpretative pathology. We
can begin to understand its emergence in the postwar period as part
of a cultural conversation about human autonomy and
individuality.

Narratives of this kind extend this scope of inquiry by staging
connections between cybernetics and a wide range of concerns,
including a critique of capitalism, connection between entropy and
schizophrenic delusion, conspiracy theories and a persistent
suspicion that the objects surrounding us--and reality itself--are
illusions. The characters in Vineland display the paranoid tropes
of their predecessors: the fear of psychological, corporate, and
state control; the sensitivity to messages and codes; the
quasi-religious obsession with words that intersect; the struggle
against the guilt that freights psyches; the search for 'higher
order variables' that survive trans-formations of life and death.
Dramatizing paranoia on the global scale of Gravity's
Rainbow enabled Pynchon to indict Western culture itself for
crimes committed in the name of angelic flight. As he has since
announced in occasional bulletins such as 'Is It OK to be a
Luddite?' (1984, 40-41), however, the dangers posed by the
Information Age are almost as profound as those of an age we used
to call atomic. The threat implicit in Vineland is not the
destruction of a planet but the Frankensteinian transformation of a
whole culture. Behind the references to game shows and sit-coms,
behind Ronald Reagan's 'snoozy fan-tasy' (Pynchon 1990, 354) of
America, lies a renascent fascist state.

Arguments about the existence of secret treachery in the highest
ranks of public and private leadership have rarely seemed so
popular and pervasive as they seem today. The commercially
successful film JFK is merely one example of the
post-Watergate genre of conspiracy fiction (examples of which
include the Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts film Conspiracy
Theory and television shows such as The X-Files and
Dark Skies). Uncovering the secrets of public and private
power is also a staple of investigative journalism, political
campaigns, and the everyday lives of citizens distributing pieces
of information into an explanatory framework that posits an
affirmative effort by a clandestine force to consolidate power and
subordinate others. Implicit in this circulation of popular
narratives, investigations of official perfidy, and generalized
suspicion is the notion that not only is there interest in a
comprehensive explanation for the failure of some political, social
and/or personal order, but that such an explanation may aptly
describe reality.

On the one hand, conspiracy theory is often characterized as
illegitimate, pathological, and a threat to political instability;
on the other hand, it seems an entertaining narrative form, a
populist expression of a democratic culture that circulates deep
skepticism about the truth of the current political order
throughout contemporary culture.

Despite the masculinist implications of this tradition, it is
essential to see that a similarly gendered conception of social
control has also been mobilized for progressive, feminist purposes.
One reason the masculinist tradition encodes social control as
feminization is that feminization is a pervasive and tangible form
of disempowerment. To depict feminization as a dangerous hollowing
out and occupation of the female subject, therefore, is to advance
a critique with powerful feminist possibilities. Writers such as
Acker and Atwood mount just such a critique, using scenes of
agency panic to illuminate the violent effects of patriarchal
social scripts. Their characters discover that they have been
programmed to display self-destructive, feminine behavior by the
insinuation into them of something like 'female nerves.' If this
discovery leads them to panic about the invasion of their bodies by
forms of external regulation, it also gives them a feminist
perspective on their own control and allows them a vision of
resistance to that control.

Knight discusses feminist writers such as Friedman, Wolf and
Faludi and how the language of conspiracy has led to rhetorical
divisions not just between academic and popular feminism, but also
with popular feminist writings. I feel that Knight's focus on
feminism and figuration of conspiracy in this section is presented
in a much too general manner using a certain canon of feminist
writers. However, it is interesting to see how he observes the
collective pronoun in feminist writing to answer to a desire for
solidarity in opposing patriarchy, yet insisting on using 'we' to
bring an implicit polarization between those who are subjected to
the conspiracy to brainwash women and those who are subject and
wise subjects, able to recognize, criticize, and even to overcome
its powers. Friedman, for example, mainly discusses 'the
brainwashing of American women in the third person plural, giving
the impression that--as she openly admits--once was brainwashed by
the feminine mystique, but now she has escaped the conditioning.'
(CC, 141). Wolf in The Beauty Myth, enacts a basic but
contradictory division between those who are duped and those who
are in the know. She is both 'a victim and vanquisher of a
conspiracy whose spectral form hovers over the text (CC, 141).'

The sections entitled, 'The Fear of a Black Planet,' named after
a Public Enemy album, and 'Body Panic' are by far
the most interesting chapters in the book. Knight takes us from the
civil rights era departing from the Hoftstadter paranoid style and
into the Afrocentric reworking history of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo
Jumbo, to the world of O.J. Simpson, the Nation of Islam and
gangsta rap. African American conspiracy culture has a long history
with racial suspicion and hostility. What is entirely new,
according to Knight, is that 'paranoia' in black America is a
matter of fierce and explicit argument both within black
communities and in the mythical mainstream of American society.
Knights cites examples of the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture of
crack cocaine with activists claiming it a genocidal germ warfare
weapon controlled by government agencies. In 'Body Panic' Knight
continues his discourse on the virus-infested body invasion by
citing the movement from the germophobic McCarthyism and Sci-fi B
films of body invaders in the 50's to Reagan's administration of a
drug-free workplace. The use of new technology has empowered the
brute materiality of the body to come full force as seen in the
Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination. In the 1980's and
90's there appeared full-color coffee-table books of assassination
imagery, including the notorious (and previously unshown)
full-color autopsy photos and, recently, a more enhanced graphic
version on video (CC180). The compulsion and ability to show
everything (albeit often in a stylized form of choreographed
violence or sexuality) operates across a wide range of contemporary
American culture, making the body's terrors and passions one of its
principal subject matters.

The physical body and physical sciences provide the rhetorical
source for political allegories that more often than not cause
confusion between vehicle and tenor in the metaphorical contract.
The body as Knight discusses it can no longer offer stable
metaphors for national politics because the body itself is no
longer a stable entity. But in an era of rapid globalization with
its erosion and reformation of national loyalties, neither can the
body politic offer a fixed source of metaphors for the individual
body. Drawing on Derrida's discussion of the nature of metaphor, it
might be concluded that the contemporary paranoid metaphorcity of
bodily contamination produces a contamination of metaphoricity
itself (149).

Conspiracy theory begins with the observation that it is an
attempt to apprehend the past and the present by placing disparate
events within a unifying interpretive frame. As an interpretive
practice, conspiracy theory works as a form of hyperactive semiosis
in which history and politics serve as reservoirs of signs that
demand (over)interpretation, and that signify, for the interpreter,
far more than their conventional meaning. The chapter discusses
three distinct ways of conceiving of this interpretive practice: as
paranoia, as desire, and as production. As with the notion of
conspiracy theory as a form of political paranoia, understanding
conspiracy theory as a paranoid form of interpretation is somewhat
insightful: conspiracy theory does resemble the textbook definition
of paranoia as a systemic and chronic delusion that is,
paradoxically, logically sustained in the interpretation of
perceived external stimuli, but it displaces the cultural and
specifically semiotic challenge posed by conspiracy theory's notion
of pathology. Both desire and production, however, conceive of
conspiracy theory as an active, endless process that continually
seeks, but never fully arrives at, a final interpretation.
The 'Body Panic' chapter analyzes the impossible, almost utopian
drive of the theorist who continually fetishizes individual signs
while placing them within vast interpretive structures that try to
stop the signs' unlimited semiosis. Conspiracy theory pays back
more in meaning than the theorist's original investment by
recognizing, depleting, building, and destroying new signs in the
perpetual motion of interpretation, producing a surplus of
interpretation and affective dividends. It thus displaces the
citizen's desire for political significance onto a signifying
regime in which interpretation replaces political engagement.

This book concerns the narrative framework within which this
interpretive practice attempts to position the signs it seeks and
so abundantly finds. The narrative frame and interpretive practices
are mutually dependent elements of conspiracy theory as practice.
Interpretation can't take place in an explanatory vacuum, and so
the conspiracy's progenitors and motives are required for signs to
be understood; at the same time, in order for the secret political
order to be revealed in a narrative, it must be found in signs that
are read for deeper meanings. Moreover, because the interpretation
of conspiracy is endless, the conspiracy narrative can have no
final closure. Although 'nonfictional' and fictional narratives
attempt to resolve seemingly all-powerful cabals through the work
of the singular investigator, their closures can't fully contain
the secret worlds they divulge or the challenges that these worlds
represent. Instead, they offer reformist and heroic solutions in
which the truth is found and order is restored by characters
working within, or returning power to, the political structures
previously infiltrated by the evil conspiracy. The structural
challenge posed by the conspiracy can't be fully contained within
this closure--except when the conspiracy narrative is articulated
within the surreal and parodic, as in the novels of Richard Condon
(and the cinematic adaptation of his Winter Kills [1979])
and Craig Baldwin's film Tribulation 99 (1991). The
conspiracy narrative is an employment of power, a mapping of an
explicable power structure that both serves and undermines
conspiracy theory's executive interpretive practices.

The final chapter concludes with a Pynchon/DeLillo-esque
rhetoric of global connectedness under the rubric of 'six degrees
of separation.' In the age of globalization, some forms of
connectedness are paranoiacally discouraged, while others are
feverishly promoted. Stern warnings against the free flow of
libidinal desire are issued by the very same voices calling for the
unfettered circulation of consumer desire (in the form of capital
and information rather than individual workers) in the global
market. In a world in which everything is connected, individual and
national boundaries begin to blur, and an older, more comforting
form of paranoia which dealt with rigid certainties and
organizations in effect gives way to schizophrenia of immediacy.
For some theorists and cultural practitioners this cyborg fluidity
opens up the possibility of escape from constricting forms of
identity. But for others it means that threatening forces are
perpetually invading the last remnants of the private space of the
self, and the very idea of a separate and autonomous self that is
eroding. The most primitive response to the cybernetic construct is
paranoia. The paranoic's delusionary system is a defense against
the oppressiveness of the system. In the compartmentalized
epistemology based on a need-to-know policy, no one ever has the
full picture except, of course, X-Files's 'Cancer Man' (as Mulder
calls him) who pulls all the strings in history.

To conclude, Knight cites examples from DeLillo's
Underworld, 'Minute Maid' orange juice to the virtual Web
that provides an ideal breeding ground for conspiracy thinking in
its architecture of insatiable connectivity. In this vision
of total saturation the last enclaves of mystery and nonconformity
will eventually disappear, as everything comes under the control of
the media-military-industrial complex that no longer even has to
hide its power-crazed domination. It is tempting to conclude the
book with dire predictions about the dangers of mass paranoia, but
Knight portrays a rhetoric of conspiracy that has given voice to a
world in which the notions of self-sufficient agency,
self-contained bodily identity and straightforward causality are no
longer convincing, but which has not yet come to terms with, or
come up with, the terms for a posthumanist alternative (CC,
244).

In its apocalyptic narrative vision and semiotic apparatus,
conspiracy theory assumes the coming end of a moment cursed by
secret power and a (never-to-arrive) new beginning where secrecy
vanishes and power is transparent and utilized by good people for
the good of all. It may appear as a righteous apocalyptic that
would claim to be acting on behalf of divine or human justice,
positing a necessary end to history through dreadful but deserved
events that would lead to the victory of the fellow righteous; it
may appear as an ironic apocalypse, facing an unavoidable end with
distance and cynicism; or it may appear as a sublime vision of an
infinite power-inspiring awe, terror, and pleasure, enabling the
assertion of regressive authorities that promise protective
repression from the great hovering threat. Nascent in all of these
appearances is a critique of the contemporary social order and a
longing for a better one. Beyond its shortcomings as a universal
theory of power and an approach to historical and political
research, conspiracy theory ultimately fails as a political and
cultural practice. It not only fails to inform us how to move from
the end of the uncovered plot to the beginning of a political
movement; it is also unable to locate a material position at which
we can begin to organize people in a world sectioned by complex
divisions based on class, race, gender, sexuality and other social
antagonisms.3